Red Bull Street Style

I just returned from the Canadian National Championships of Red Bull Street Style (a client of ours). I will let the images taken from my video camera do the talking.

The point of this video is to demonstrate how effective Red Bull has been at living the values of their brand. The vibe at their events is contagious. An amazing brand story.

Webcast - Live from Dell

On Nov 12 (at 12 noon EST), I am participating in a live webcast from Dell's headquarters in Round Rock TX.

Dell is hosting a virtual panel discussion featuring the winners of the Dell SMB Award (from Canada, US, Mexico and Brazil). The discussion will focus on how companies are using technology to cut costs, increase efficiency, improve customer relations and grow.

You are welcome to join the webcast by registering here

The official press release can be found here

Michael Dell and the Internet: a view from 1999

I was just reading some remarks made in 1999 by Michael Dell on Building a Competitive Advantage in an Internet Economy.


While so much has changed in the 10 years since Dell made this speech, I am struck by how much of this is still relevant in 2009.


Consider the following excerpt:

"The Internet is also decreasing the cost of interactions. For instance, instead of making printer circuit boards, Dell has a supplier that does it, whom we treat as part of our company and with whom we exchange information at very little cost and at very high speeds. The Internet is shrinking time and distance, allowing us to bring our customers and our suppliers inside our business, and creating shared efficiencies and greater loyalty. Companies that recognize this can take advantage of it; those that don’'t will end up as road kill on the information super highway."

The fact that information has become even more readily available in the last 10 years reinforces this point. This has even extended beyond business into the consumer realm with the advent of Web 2.0 and how we as consumers now embrace open and public relationships with one another on Twitter, Facebook, etc. Web 2.0 indeeds shrinks time and distance when it comes to how we now interact with each other as individuals online.

Dell's thoughts on how to build an internet based business also remain true to this day.

"We focus on three areas: (i) building rich content, (ii) growing our commerce capabilities, and (iii) establishing communities of suppliers and end users that share common interests."

While a lot of this is pretty standard - table stakes, even - in 2009, it's interesting to reflect back on what the internet was like in 1999. I know in our case at RIGHTSLEEVE, we had a static web site with html product pages that were time consuming to update. We had no e-commerce functionality other than a simple quote request tool to interact with our customers. Having said that, it was pretty unique at the time in the context of the industry. It was a start.

In the early 2000's, we evolved into a database driven web site with full e-commerce capabilities, online store applications and a backend CRM/VRM system that allows us to interact with every customer and supplier around the world online. In the process, we dramatically changed how we did business, giving us a platform on which to compete within a hyper competitive industry.

It's interesting to consider how fast internet technology has changed in the past decade. The Web 1.0 (webvan.com, pets.com) bubble has burst, Web 2.0 (youtube.com, twitter.com) has taken the world by storm and now we are starting to see the beginnings of Web 3.0 (twine.com) and the so-called semantic web.

Despite these rapid changes in the types of internet models we see today, I don't think we have strayed too far from the enduring principles that were discussed by Michael Dell in 1999.

RIGHTSLEEVE in Profit Magazine - get your free copy here!

RIGHTSLEEVE's customer retention strategies are featured in the latest issue of Profit Magazine. To honour this occasion, we'd like to send you a free copy.

Just fill out this form here, and we will mail out the issue on the double.

Customer Retention Strategies

In the current issue of Profit Magazine, we were featured in a story on innovative ways to retain customers.

You can read the article here

It was also nice to be featured alongside two entrepreneurs I have a great deal of respect for - Dmitry Buterin of Bonasource and Matt Teichmann of Life Choices Foods.

Timeless Business Principles

Fresh out of university in 1997, I started my business career in investment banking. I lasted 4 months.

While the experience was rewarding (I learned how to use Excel like a pro), I was more suited to entrepreneurship as I always wanted to build something I could call my own. (I also had a mind for sales/marketing, not finance).

Given my time in investment banking, I was interested how Goldman Sachs - the industry's 800 pound gorilla - grew from a mid-tier firm to a global powerhouse over the course of a few decades. To learn more about this rise, I have been reading Charles Ellis's The Partnership: The Making of Goldman Sachs

I have very little connection to the investment banking industry these days (my Excel skills have also weakened over time!), nor do I endorse the shenanigans of modern day Wall Street. However, what I have found interesting about this book are some of the timeless business principles that can be applied to almost any enterprise, regardless of industry or company size.

This is also not a commentary on Goldman Sachs per se, but rather a look at how one company within one industry was able to grow by applying some surprisingly simple principles.

In 1970 (long before subprime mortgages and credit default swaps), John Whitehead, a co-head of the firm, wrote the following ten commandments that guided their business development efforts:

1. Don't waste your time going after business we don't really want.
2. The boss usually decides - not the assistant treasurer. Do you know the boss?
3. It's just as easy to get a first-rate piece of business as a second-rate one.
4. You never learn anything when you are talking.
5. The client's objective is more important than yours.
6. The respect of one person is worth more than acquaintance with 100.
7. When there's business to be done, get it!
8. Important people like to deal with other important people. Are you one?
9. There's nothing worse than an unhappy client.
10. If you get the business, it's up to you to see that it's well handled.

As an entrepreneur, I reflect on these "10 commandments" and many of them make perfect sense, especially for an organization that wants to be outstanding (or be a Purple Cow, as Seth Godin would say). Many people in business waste a lot of time chasing opportunities that just do not make sense and act as a distraction to what really matters.

I particularly agree with commandments 4, 5, 6, 9 and 10. These are absolutely timeless and should be ingrained in any organization's culture, for-profits and non-profits alike.

This is a long book at 752 pages, but if you were to read anything, I would recommend Chapter 11, entitled "Principles" (pp 183-214).

My Take on Google Apps: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Now that we have been using Google Apps for the better part of 3 months, I wanted to give a review of how it has worked for us and whether we really miss Microsoft Outlook. This is also a glimpse into how we work on a daily basis at RIGHTSLEEVE.

I was intrigued about Google Apps ever since I learned about its forthcoming release back in 2006 when I attended the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco. The idea that one could run an entire email service off the web (with our own domain) offered some huge advantages.


It took a few years for us to finally pull the trigger as we were so heavily invested in Microsoft technology. Old habits also die hard.


Now that we have moved over to Google Apps, here's the good, the bad and the ugly:


The Good

- the price is right. Google Apps is free, though you can upgrade to $50/user/year for some additional features.


- avoid paying for the expensive Microsoft Exchange which offers calendar sharing, among other enterprise friendly features.

- shared calendars

- syncing contacts and calendar records with a Blackberry/iPhone is done wirelessly

- no more spam (or at least very little of it)

- our IT administrator's time has been freed up as he no longer manages the myriad problems we had with Outlook (mail server crashing, etc)

- no need to backup our mail server

- more intuitive email filters

- email search capabilities are vastly superior to Outlook

- Google Docs is great for sharing documents and spreadsheets in real time across the organization. We still use our server for the majority of our files (ie artwork), but Google Docs makes it easy to work on projects in real time with other team members - no emailed Word attachments!

- the ability to access our files anywhere on any internet connected computer (this is also how our own CRM and production system works as well).

- email is stored in one place regardless of where the email was sent or received.

- managing "out of office" replies is so much easier

The Bad

- Google's Blackberry App is average at best (I am referring here to the Blackberry BIS service as I believe Google works better with Blackberry BES).

- searching for past emails takes quite a while on the Blackberry (min 20 seconds - a surprise for the company that pioneered the 0.7 second search results)

- when using the Blackberry, it does not access "all contacts" when composing emails (it only accesses your most recent contacts). You can access all contacts but it means digging into a few menus and then waiting minimum 20 seconds for all of the contacts to load).

- on the web, the contacts menu within Gmail takes a while to load and searching for contacts is time consuming (searching for a contact takes approx 4x longer than searching for a past email)

- cannot copy and paste attachments into Gmail like you can with Outlook (if I want to add an attachment I have to upload it to the outgoing message, something I could have just pasted into an Outlook message before).

- when you import your calendar records from Outlook into Google Apps, you lose your recurring events.

The Ugly

- data usage is very high on the Blackberry which means having to upgrade to a more expensive local plan. It gets even worse when you are in a different country as data charges are a usurious $6/MB - I use an average of 45-55MB of data per month. Data usage on the Blackberry before I moved to Google Apps was a tenth of what I use now.

The Bottom Line

Over the past 3 months, Google Apps have been down twice (a much publicized event on Twitter). The sum total of the service outage has been 3-4 hrs, not really a big deal in the grand scheme of things. When we were using Outlook and had to manage our own mail server, we spent more time dealing with problems which affected our access to email.

Overall, the switch has been worth it. The ability to collaborate with one another across our organization has been the number one benefit, with the time we have saved on IT hassles being a close second.

Hope this helps. If we've missed anything, be sure to comment accordingly.

hoHOTo merchandise - a sneak peak!

We are proud to introduce the gear for hoHOTo. Special thanks to Sheri Moore (@s_moore) for her keen eye in picking the styles with us!

This limited edition merchandise is for sale on site at hoHOTo - cash sales only.

All proceeds from the merchandise will be donated to the Daily Bread Food Bank. Spread the word!

(click image to enlarge)